The Queen and the Cure (The Bird and the Sword Chronicles, #2)

“No. But the kingdom waits, unchanged, for her return. If you walk through the forest and look at the trunks, each one has a face hidden in the bark, a shifter waiting to become human again, sleeping inside the tree.”

He noticed the men traveling closest to them were listening, their heads bent to hear her story, and he bristled at the intrusion. When one story ended, they asked for another, and another, until they were all traveling at a snail’s pace, ears peeled, listening to her spin tales. Her voice was pleasing—low and gentle—and she told the stories as if they were as much a part of her as the palms of her hands or the red of her hair. When they stopped for the night, they’d traveled only half as far as they should have, and the men begged her for more stories around the fire.

Each night was a different tale. She described the creatures in the Drue Forest and the trolls from the mountains of Corvyn—Kjell told her of the queen’s valued friend, Boojohni. She knew stories of the Changer who became a dragon, of the king who built an army, of the lark who became a queen. Some of the stories she told were true—recent history—and the men loved those stories even more, nodding as she polished their own memories with the burnished glow of retelling. Sasha claimed those stories had spread all over the land, traveling from one mouth to another until they found her in Solemn. When his men asked her if she knew about King Tiras slaying the Volgar Liege only to be mortally wounded himself, she nodded and looked at Kjell.

“I’ve heard that tale. And I’ve heard the tale of a mighty Healer, saving the king and restoring balance to the kingdom,” she said.

Kjell grunted and stood, embarrassed. His men cleared their throats and shared weighted looks. He sent them all to bed, kicking dirt on the fire Isak started, just to make them disperse. They had no rabbits to cook, no water to spare for tea, no reason for a fire. The men rose reluctantly and, with beseeching looks, thanked Sasha for the entertainment. In only a few days, armed with a string of tales, she’d turned his battalion into a herd of sheep, following at her heels without a thought in their head but the next morsel.

She mothered them. She mothered him.

He hated it and loved it. He wished her quiet and prayed she would never stop talking. She made him both jubilant and miserable, and he found himself waiting with irritation and anticipation each night for the moment the men gathered and looked at her with pleading eyes and she acquiesced, telling them stories like they were children around her knees.

Each morning he awoke to boots that had been shined, clothes that had been shaken and aired, and a horse that had been brushed. She always woke before him, no matter how hard he tried to beat her to it. It was as if she knew when he would rise. His men smirked at her devotion, but she was so genuinely easy to be around, so cheerful and meek, that it was hard to tease her. She just smiled and played along, unconcerned with jest, indifferent to anyone’s opinion but his.

He could tell his disapproval bothered her.

He didn’t ignore her. But he didn’t dote on her either. He never asked her for a thing, yet he never thanked her for anything she did. She rode with him each day, never complaining, saving her best stories for him, and he listened, rarely contributing, pretending he was ambivalent toward her.

She’d grown quiet after a particularly interesting story about sea creatures in the Jeruvian Sea, and he was strategizing ways to make her speak without actually asking for her to do so.

“There’s a storm.” Sasha tugged on his arm. She turned her face, making sure he was listening. She wasn’t panicked, but her pulse thrummed at the base of her throat, and her eyes grew so wide they frightened him. It was just a smear on the horizon, a writhing in the distance that portended the arrival—or departure—of something that would never reach them. But Sasha saw something else.

“There’s a storm coming,” she repeated, and pointed toward the dark smudge, her finger outlined against a sky so impossibly blue, he should have laughed. He didn’t.

She began looking this way and that, searching for shelter. “There will be sand everywhere. We won’t be able to breathe.” Her chest started to rise and fall, as if oxygen deprivation had already begun. Then she shuddered, shrugging it off and keeping herself grounded in the present.

Kjell cursed, his eyes scanning the way hers had done moments before. The terrain from Quondoon to Enoch was rolling and relentlessly unvaried. Red dunes and dust littered with the occasional sandstone outcropping surrounded them in every direction. They needed a gully, something to create a barrier between them and what was coming.

He grasped Sasha’s chin and drew her gaze.

“Do you see shelter? Where should we go?”

She shook her head helplessly, and he could see the growing panic in her black gaze. Warning them of a tempest was of little help if there was no way to escape it. Then her eyes fell to Kjell’s lips and something shifted in her face, like she’d seen something entirely different than a looming storm.

“A cave. We are in a cave,” she murmured.

He released her chin and looked again, scouring the landscape for a hiding place large enough for two dozen men and an equal number of horses.

“There!” To his far right a rocky protrusion jabbed the sky like the remains of an ancient temple. It was far enough off that it could be bigger than it seemed or prove completely insufficient. But Sasha was starting to tremble, and her eyes had strayed once more to the innocuous dark cloud in the distance.

His men were still unaware, and he roared instructions, pointing toward the ridge and demanding they follow him. They didn’t hesitate, veering to the right, pushing to keep up with him. He heard Jerick cry out and turned to see that the darkness at their backs had grown, spreading, gobbling up the sky.

“Sandstorm!” his men shouted, and the rest of their words were lost in the wind. They spurred their horses toward the stony shelf, flying across the sand, racing the tempest.

Beneath the jutting overhang, as wide as three horses end to end, and as tall as two men were high, was an enormous cavern. The depth was obscured by darkness, causing a moment’s hesitation, but they had no choice. The horses balked, but the growing roar at their backs urged them forward.

“Lead them in!” Kjell shouted and slid from his horse, pulling Sasha with him.

“Isak, we need light.”

The fire starter rubbed his palms together, spinning a flame between them, widening his hands as his orb grew, lighting the immediate recesses, and making the walls around them jump into instant relief. Kjell led the way, one hand on his horse’s mane, the other on his sword. He wasn’t especially fond of serpents, and he had little doubt there were snakes in the cave. Snakes and bats.